Given a keyword, there are many situations (particularly in information retrieval technology) in which it is useful to expand the keyword into other related keywords, which is referred to as keyword expansion. For example, the keyword “Microsoft” may be expanded to “Windows”, “Office”, and so on. This facilitates returning more relevant search results, for example, such as when insufficient results are returned because of a limited search term or terms.
Previously, keyword expansion was accomplished by leveraging search engines. One such approach feeds a keyword to a Web search engine, receives results in response, and extracts related words from snippets generated from the returned results. These related words are used as the expanded keywords.
However, the above-described approach depends on the quality of the external search engine, and is further dependent on the availability and performance of the search engine. Further, the expansion depends on which algorithm is used to generate the snippets, none of which have heretofore worked particularly well.